The Relevance Trap
When the pursuit of new audiences threatens the meaning, loyalty and cultural equity brands spent decades building.
In November 2024, Jaguar did something few ninety-year-old brands would dare to do: it made itself almost unrecognisable. The campaign introducing its new identity featured no cars. Instead, models dressed in sculptural, brightly coloured clothing moved through an otherworldly landscape beneath phrases such as “delete ordinary,” “live vivid” and “copy nothing.” Much of the familiar visual language of Jaguar had disappeared. Even the name looked different.
The reaction was swift and, in places, vicious. Yet the most interesting thing about Jaguar’s transformation was never whether people liked the new logo or thought the campaign looked ridiculous. Rebrands attract that sort of commentary almost by reflex. Jaguar had done something far more consequential: it had asked consumers to reconsider what Jaguar was.
There were sound commercial reasons for doing so. The company was preparing for a radically different future, repositioning itself as an all-electric luxury marque at a considerably higher point in the market. Its leadership believed that incremental change would not adequately communicate the scale of that ambition.
What makes the story fascinating is that Jaguar does not consider this a rejection of its heritage. “Copy Nothing,” the organising idea behind the new brand, comes directly from founder Sir William Lyons, who believed that a Jaguar should be a copy of nothing. From the company’s perspective, this is less an abandonment of Jaguar than an attempt to recover the originality that once made it exceptional.
Perhaps it is.
But consumers do not experience brands through corporate strategy documents. They experience them through accumulated memory. And after ninety years, Jaguar had accumulated rather a lot of it. That is what makes Jaguar useful beyond the debate over whether its rebrand is good or bad. It raises a much harder question: how much can you change about a brand before you change what the brand means?
Every established brand eventually has to answer some version of it. Markets change, products evolve and new generations arrive with different expectations. What once felt contemporary begins to show its age, and a brand that refuses to respond eventually risks irrelevance.
But the meaning of a brand is not entirely determined by the company that owns it.
Over time, consumers develop their own understanding of what a brand represents, shaped by repeated experiences, personal associations and the role it plays in their lives. A product might become part of a weekly routine, a family tradition or a familiar presence that requires little conscious thought. These relationships rarely appear in a marketing report, yet they can be among the most valuable assets a business possesses.
Consider someone who has chosen the same brand for twenty or thirty years. They have purchased it, recommended it, perhaps introduced it to their children. Through those ordinary acts, they have contributed to the brand's familiarity, reputation and cultural meaning. They may never think of themselves as participating in brand building. They simply know what the brand means to them. Then the company decides its future lies with a different audience.
The advertising changes. The people representing it change. The occasions it associates itself with change. Perhaps the product experience changes too. Individually, those decisions may be entirely reasonable. Collectively, they can leave established consumers wondering whether the brand they have supported for years still considers them important. This is an aspect of brand evolution that receives remarkably little attention.
We discuss repositioning in terms of growth, opportunity and relevance, often without considering how those decisions affect the relationships that made the brand valuable in the first place.And those relationships can be surprisingly difficult to rebuild once weakened.
Victoria's Secret offers a revealing example.
For decades, Victoria's Secret sold fantasy. Its elaborate fashion shows, Angels, wings and theatrical campaigns created a world of glamour, seduction and transformation. The Angels were central to that world, becoming celebrities through their association with Victoria's Secret while helping establish the prestige of its runway.
The brand's presentation of femininity, however, was extraordinarily narrow. As cultural expectations changed, Victoria's Secret faced legitimate pressure to become more inclusive. There was an opportunity to broaden the fantasy, allowing different women and different expressions of femininity to participate in the world the brand had created. But the fantasy had acquired meaning through more than its visual presentation.
The Angels themselves were part of Victoria's Secret's cultural authority. Their professional standing, recognisability and longstanding association with the brand helped make the runway an achievement within the modelling industry. Victoria's Secret gave those women a platform, and their presence helped make Victoria's Secret desirable. The relationship worked in both directions.
That history makes the conversation surrounding the 2026 fashion show particularly interesting.
The return of the Fantasy Bra, worn by Kylie Jenner in her Victoria's Secret runway debut, attracted considerable attention. At the same time, discussion surrounding the absence of established Angels like Romee Strijd, raised questions about the place of professional modelling, celebrity and online influence in an event whose prestige was built partly through the models associated with it.
The reasons behind individual casting decisions are not necessarily known. But the suggestion that an established model's relevance should be measured primarily by the audience she has cultivated online reflects a broader shift in how cultural value is increasingly assessed.
There is obvious commercial value in working with people who bring substantial audiences. Influencers and celebrities can introduce brands to new consumers, generate publicity and create conversations that traditional advertising might struggle to achieve.
Yet Victoria's Secret once possessed the cultural authority to help turn models into household names. Becoming an Angel meant something because the brand had spent years making it mean something.
When the prestige of an institution becomes increasingly dependent on the fame of the people it invites, an interesting reversal begins to take place. The brand that once helped create cultural significance risks becoming dependent on borrowing it. That does not make celebrity participation inherently damaging. The question is whether the people selected reinforce the meaning of the brand or whether their visibility becomes the principal measure of their value.
The same question applies to the spectacle itself.
Victoria's Secret has always been theatrical. But the spectacle worked because it supported a particular promise, expressed through the models, the styling, the product and the standard of presentation. Consumer criticism surrounding the recent show's fit and styling, whether representative of the broader audience or not, points to an important tension: a production can generate enormous attention while leaving some viewers questioning the experience that attention is supposed to celebrate.
For a brand built around desire, those details matter.
What makes this particularly relevant to marketing is that each decision can be justified independently. A celebrity attracts attention. An influencer introduces a new audience. A different creative direction reflects changing cultural expectations. A larger spectacle generates conversation. The difficulty emerges when the pursuit of those individual objectives begins to alter the associations that made the brand distinctive.
The relevance trap begins when brands become so focused on who they want to attract that they lose sight of why people chose them in the first place.
Social media has made that temptation harder to resist. Cultural participation is now almost constant, with new trends, creators and conversations appearing every week. Brands are encouraged to respond quickly, adopt the language of emerging audiences and demonstrate that they understand the moment. But cultural visibility and brand relevance are not necessarily the same thing.
A brand can become more visible without becoming more desirable. It can attract a younger audience's attention without giving that audience a compelling reason to choose it. And it can modernise its image while gradually weakening the associations that sustained consumer preference for decades.
Walmart's 2025 identity refresh offers an interesting counterpoint.
The retailer had every reason to modernise. Its business now extends far beyond physical stores, encompassing e-commerce, apps, delivery and a much broader digital ecosystem. Yet Walmart looked to its own history for the materials to do it.
The refreshed wordmark drew inspiration from lettering on founder Sam Walton's old trucker hat. The Spark remained, as did the familiar blue and yellow. The visual system became cleaner and more flexible, but Walmart made remarkably little effort to disguise what it was. It still looked like Walmart.
There is something quietly confident about that. Familiarity was treated as an asset rather than evidence that the brand had become stale.
The decision also feels particularly well timed. Younger consumers have shown an appetite for aesthetics associated with periods they never experienced, while older consumers encounter those same references through memory. For heritage brands, the past can work in two directions at once: recognition for one audience, discovery for another.
Sometimes what looks old inside a marketing department does not feel old to the consumer at all.
That distinction matters when conversations about relevance turn, as they often do, to Gen Z.
Younger consumers matter enormously, but attracting them does not necessarily require a brand to behave as though it is young itself. There is a subtle difference between asking how to make a brand younger and asking why that brand should matter to a younger person today.
Hermès understands the difference unusually well. The house has existed since 1837, yet continues to attract new generations without continually reconstructing itself in their image. Products change. Collections change. Campaigns change. The culture surrounding luxury changes. But Hermès remains remarkably disciplined about the craftsmanship, quality, creativity and exclusivity that underpin its desirability.
Its younger consumers are given reasons to want Hermès. The house does not need to imitate them to earn their attention. That approach also reveals an alternative that is sometimes overlooked in discussions about repositioning.
Changing consumer behaviour may call for a different product, format, collaboration, service or experience. A brand can create new entry points for emerging audiences without requiring its entire identity to accommodate every shift in culture. Sometimes the offer needs to evolve more than the brand itself.
For Caribbean brands, this conversation deserves particular attention because familiarity here can run deep. Brands become entangled with place, language, music, celebrations, family routines and memories. Some have been present long enough that people do not simply recognise them; they locate them within their own lives.
This kind of familiarity can be commercially powerful. It can also become almost invisible to the people responsible for managing it.
When a brand has been part of the market for decades, the very qualities that make it recognisable can begin to feel ordinary. What feels ordinary starts to feel dated. And once something has been labelled dated, there is a temptation to replace it with whatever currently signifies relevance.
That might mean younger language, more fashionable environments, a polished visual identity, new ambassadors or the aesthetic codes of premiumisation. Each decision can be supported by legitimate commercial objectives. The risk lies in making them without sufficiently understanding what consumers already value about the brand.
There is a particular irony in Caribbean brands, surrounded by extraordinarily distinctive cultures, borrowing generic internet culture to demonstrate cultural relevance. A global company might spend years trying to manufacture the provenance, recognition and cultural memory that an established Caribbean brand already possesses. Yet familiarity can make that equity seem less exciting than the attention a new campaign might generate. And attention is considerably easier to measure.
A creator may attract thousands of interactions with a campaign, while an established consumer purchases the product every week without ever engaging with the brand online. One relationship is visible in a dashboard. The other may be quietly sustaining the business. Both have value, but they tell us different things.
A campaign can perform exceptionally well on social media without strengthening the reasons people choose the brand. An activation can attract a crowd without improving the product experience. A new ambassador can introduce the brand to a desirable audience while weakening its connection with the consumers who have supported it for years.
These outcomes are not inevitable. But they illustrate why campaign performance and brand health cannot be treated as interchangeable. And the consequences are rarely immediate.
Brand equity can erode through a succession of seemingly reasonable decisions; a slightly different audience, a more fashionable creative direction, a new interpretation of aspiration, a shift in the occasions the brand chooses to celebrate. Over time, the accumulated effect can be a brand that attracts plenty of attention but feels increasingly unfamiliar to the people who once chose it without hesitation. That is a particularly important consideration in markets where brands have become part of everyday culture.
The objective should be to welcome new consumers without unnecessarily diminishing the relationships that made the brand valuable in the first place. Doing that requires a more demanding understanding of brand equity than recognition, reach or engagement alone can provide.
Before deciding what an established brand needs to become, marketers should understand what it already represents. Which associations genuinely influence consumer preference? Which elements have become barriers to growth, and which remain valuable precisely because they are familiar? Does a proposed change strengthen the brand's authority, or simply increase its visibility? And perhaps most importantly, what would existing consumers lose if the brand they knew became something else?
These questions should inform decisions about positioning, creative direction, partnerships, product development and the audiences a brand chooses to pursue. Without that understanding, strategy can become aesthetic preference remarkably quickly. One team wants the brand younger. Another wants it more sophisticated. Someone wants premium. Someone else wants a more fashionable ambassador. Each decision may be defensible on its own, while their cumulative effect slowly moves the brand away from the reasons people cared about it in the first place.
Some brands genuinely need reinvention. Consumer expectations can change so substantially that preserving an established identity becomes a barrier to future growth. Some associations deserve to be left behind, and Jaguar may ultimately demonstrate that its commercial ambition required an equally dramatic break with its past.
But established brands are not blank canvases.
They arrive in the hands of each new generation of marketers already carrying meaning created by the people who came before them and by consumers themselves. Brand management is therefore partly an act of stewardship. The responsibility is to understand what has been inherited, recognise what remains valuable and make deliberate decisions about what should change.
Culture will continue to evolve. So will audiences, aesthetics, platforms and expectations. Brands have to move with them. But the next time a brand manager is asked to make an established brand younger, more premium or more culturally relevant, perhaps the first question should be less about who the brand hopes to attract and more about why people choose it today.
Because the strongest brands do not remain relevant by becoming whatever the culture currently rewards. They remain relevant by finding new ways to mean something that still matters.
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